The field of this invention is surface treatment of a cylindrical object such as a pipeline or the like.
Underwater pipelines are weight-coated with concrete or other material and corrosion-resistant coated. Presently, these coatings must be manually removed by divers in order to expose the surface of the pipe for performing operations such as cutting or welding. The manual removal of concrete coating from underwater pipelines is both expensive and dangerous. The danger to divers increases with an increase in the depth of the water in which the pipeline is laid. And, it is practically impossible to utilize divers without habitats to remove concrete coatings on some of the pipelines which have been laid in very deep seas throughout the world. Insofar as known, there is no adequate machinery available for removing such coatings underwater without the use of divers.